


Because It Isn't Real

by imogenbynight



Series: Solace [2]
Category: Supernatural
Genre: Episode: s09e06 Heaven Can't Wait, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-31
Updated: 2016-08-31
Packaged: 2018-08-12 04:46:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,825
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7921081
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/imogenbynight/pseuds/imogenbynight
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The night that Castiel shares Dean's motel room in Rexford, he has disjointed dreams.</p><p>Timestamp for my canon-divergent fic, There Are Many Things.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Because It Isn't Real

**Author's Note:**

> This acts as a timestamp for my season 9 canon-divergent fic, There Are Many Things, though it can probably be read as a 9.6 fanfiction gap fic. 
> 
> It is not the sequel fic that I still have to get around to finishing, but it's been three-quarters written in my drafts folder for about a year, so I thought I'd finish it off. 
> 
> Kinda disjointed and strange, as dreams tend to be. Hopefully y'all enjoy it :)
> 
> Important: there are a couple of moments in Castiel's dream where Meg takes liberties with both Cas and Dean. While there's nothing explicit, it is suggestive, and could read as dubcon for those sensitive to that. Proceed with caution if this applies to you <3

The first few times Castiel slept as a human, he found dreams to be strange, abstract things. Each one a senseless scrambles of indescribable colors and shapes that skittered away when he tried to focus on them, making him long for his lost wings to lift him through the ether and chase them down. The dreams were disorienting, and confusing, and yet each time he instinctively knew that he was dreaming. 

When he woke from those dreams--in the homeless shelter, on the bus, under a groaning old bridge in Detroit, where rainwater ran into rust-tinted puddles--they left him haunted and dazed for stretches of time that felt much longer than he thought they should have.

Tonight, though, under thin motel sheets in a room in Rexford, his dreams are not abstractions. 

Tonight, for a long time, he doesn’t realize that he’s dreaming.

The corridor he stands in is long and dimly lit, and the floor is nothing but pressed earth, compacted by the feet of thousands. He can feel the echo of them against his inexplicably bare toes; the hum and tingle of souls that stood here long before him, and some that will come long after. He’s alone, though certain that he shouldn’t be, and he crouches down to touch the earth with his fingertips as though it might hold some answer. 

It’s damp and cool and soft, but when he tries to dig down into it his hand comes away empty.

The click of approaching boot heels alerts him to the presence of some newcomer, and he stands, even as it occurs to him that it’s strange that heels should make such a sound when they should sink silently into the unfinished floor.

The visage that emerges from the shadows is at once familiar and confusing. A heart shaped face, pale-skinned and sharp-eyed, surrounded by a tangle of bleached curls. She can’t be here, he knows. She’s dead. 

At the sight of her, Castiel is overcome with the sudden fear that he’s broken again. Seeing things that aren’t there. Her face will become Lucifer’s at any moment, he’s sure of it. Just in case, he shifts his gaze down to her boots. They still seem to be clicking even though she’s standing still. 

A disjointed rhythm, like the buttons of his jeans clicking against the inside of the laundromat clothes dryer.

“How are you doing that?” he asks, because he has a feeling that actually saying _you’re supposed to be dead_ would be rude, but Meg doesn’t answer his question. Instead, she just taps beneath his chin with her index finger so he looks up from her shoes to see her mouth twisting into a smirk.

“I wondered where you’d run off to, Clarence.”

Her voice has a gentle lilt that might be soothing if he didn’t know her better than that, and she slips past him to make her way down the hall. Without quite knowing why, Castiel turns to follow her. 

For a moment, she disappears around a corner, and when he slips around the other side he finds her leaning against the wall beside a door of dark wood. An aquarian star adorns the top panel, and below it a brass number 11. He knows this door. It doesn’t belong in this strange, shifting hallway. 

Looking from the door back to Meg, Castiel thinks that considering the door _is_ here, she belongs in this hallway even less.

Her hair, he notices, has reverted back to the dark, glossy brown it used to be. He notes that this is strange, but does not question why.

“I decided to stick it to Crowley,” she tells him anyway, and tucks a curl behind her ear before pushing the door wide. “Age before beauty.”

Dean is in the room when Castiel steps inside, sitting on the edge of his bed with a grim expression on his face. His head is bowed as he prays, and Castiel has heard this prayer before. 

He knows the words before Dean says them, remembers hearing them over and over as he ran through Purgatory with dark, oily clouds following him like shadows.

“Come back, Cas. Please,” Dean’s lips aren’t moving, but the words are loud. “I need you. I need you here.”

“I’m here,” Castiel says aloud, but Dean doesn’t react. Doesn’t stop praying.

Beside him, he feels warm breath on his cheek as Meg leans in to speak.

“You’ll have to get his attention some other way,” she tells him, and she laughs when he looks at her with a furrowed brow.

“How?”

Meg just lifts her brow slowly and slips the tan overcoat from his shoulders. She tosses it over the chair by the wall. He stares at it, certain he left that coat behind somewhere weeks ago, and only looks back at Meg when he feels her slender fingers slipping open the buttons of his shirt.

“What are you doing?”

“Helping you,” she says, before adding with an amused twitch of her lips; “Helping myself, too, if I’m being honest. You mind?”

She reaches the button at his waist and tugs the shirt upward before he can reply, stepping behind him to pull it free of his arms, and he feels the light touch of lips on his neck. The wet slide of tongue and the sharp bite of teeth as she moves back around to kiss him on the mouth. Her long hair tickles softly over his shoulder.

“You’re trusting her with this?” Dean asks suddenly, standing and taking a step toward them, and Castiel startles, meeting his eyes.

“She offered,” he says simply, and he feels Meg shift, smiling against his neck as Dean scoffs, shaking his head.

“That all it takes, huh?”

“Now, now, Dean, nobody’s stopping you from helping out,” Meg says, moving back behind him to speak over his shoulder, and then she’s tripping her fingertips down his chest, playing over his stomach with featherlight touches that are altogether incongruous with his memory of her forceful kiss.

When her hands reach his waistband, Dean catches them sharply.

She’s a cold line pressed against his back. Dean is radiating warmth from where he stands only a couple of feet before him. Castiel swallows as he meets Dean’s eyes.

“What are you doing?” he asks, even though he knows, and Dean crowds close to kiss him. He tastes like... nothing. Absolutely nothing. 

Meg tasted exactly as he remembers. Sweet and warm, a sulfuric tang at the back of his throat that makes him feel a little off kilter, a little dizzy. But try as he might, he can’t taste Dean. He wants to, desperately, and kisses him more deeply, hoping he might find the taste of him if he only tries harder.

But something is missing. It’s not enough. He feels like it’s never going to be enough.

 _That’s because this isn’t real_ , he thinks to himself, but before he has time to wonder at the absurdity of the thought Dean starts unbuttoning his fly. Castiel looks down at his fingers and thinks of them wriggling in the air in front of a baby. Bandaging his wrist. When did that happen?

“This is all wrong,” he says, catching Dean’s hand in his own, and Dean pulls it up to his face.

“I know,” Dean kisses his fingers. Sucks one into his mouth and bites down before soothing the skin with his tongue. Castiel’s stomach tenses and quivers with the sensation. “I’m sorry.”

He watches Dean work over the whole hand, lips soft, stubble rough, and wonders why it feels so disjointed, so wrong, when Dean’s touch is something he’s craved.

“You think too much, Clarence,” Meg laughs from somewhere behind him, but when he looks over his shoulder she’s not there, and the room has shifted around them somehow, turned into a suburban street lined with tall trees and dotted with pools of lamplight. “Peekaboo.”

Jerking his head back around, he finds Dean has been replaced by Nora. She’s studying his hand with detachment, like he’s a dented can of soup that she’s checking for leaks before deciding whether or not it’s saleable. Meg is just past her shoulder, grinning at him, and beyond her Dean is standing under one of the streetlamps. Just watching Castiel with a wounded look in his eyes.

Nora drops his hand.

“I don’t want this,” she says flatly, and walks away. 

In the moment he spares to watch her leave, Meg has started to undress Dean, and Dean is paying no attention. Just staring at Castiel like he’s been betrayed, as though he hasn’t noticed her tugging his overshirt from his arms, hasn’t felt his t-shirt being lifted up and over his head. 

“Stop,” Castiel tells her, but Meg only smirks, scratching blood-red nails over Dean’s exposed stomach. 

“Do you think it stings?” she asks, looking back at him with mock pity and jutting out her lip as she trips her fingertips over the scratches, and Castiel doesn’t even think about it. Just rushes forward and drops to his knees to press his lips against them.

Dean’s hands fall to his hair on a sigh, and when he glances up to see him staring down, he remembers their positions reversed. Remembers looking down through a gauzy film of Heaven’s control at Dean on his knees, his face bloodied and broken, his voice fractured, pleading for Castiel to fight it. Telling him he needed him.

He’s still there, now, he realizes. Not in Dean’s room at the bunker, or on a street in Idaho, but in Lucifer’s crypt. As if on cue, the street flickers away, and he’s exactly where he thought he was. 

Of course Meg is still alive. She was never gone. He must have been confused by Naomi’s hold over him. 

The stone floor is rough and cold against his knees.

He leans forward again, pressing his lips to Dean’s stomach. He doesn’t wonder why Dean is shirtless. Where the tablet is. Nothing matters; only that he show penance. Show need.

“I need you, too,” he breathes against warm skin, and feels Dean’s hand tighten in his hair. “I need you, too.”

He repeats the words so many times that they blend and overlap, echoing in his own head, and with his eyes closed and his face turned against the soft warmth of Dean’s stomach he loses himself in his own need, his own desperation. 

“I need you, too,” he murmurs, lips catching on cotton, and opens his eyes to a dark motel room. His hair is plastered to his forehead, damp with sweat, and the hum of an ice machine outside cuts through the quiet.

Dean is still asleep, turned to his side across the gulf of pilled carpet that separates their beds, and Castiel watches him, trying not to think of his dream. Trying not to wish, as he had in his sleep, to know the taste of his lips. 


End file.
